PORTUGAL: Asylum for African Refugees Stranded in the Desert

By Mario de Queiroz Reprint | | Print |

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Jan 24 2006 (IPS) - For 12 African refugees who finally found shelter in Portugal, the violence, persecution and abuses that they thought they had left behind in their home countries were still present during their long journeys, when they were abandoned to their fate in the middle of the Sahara desert.

The most talkative members of the group who met with journalists in the Portuguese capital were two of the five who came from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a former Belgian colony in central Africa known in the past as Zaire. The group also included seven refugees from West Africa – five from Ivory Coast and two from Liberia.

The interminable dunes of the Sahara desert are a painful, tragic memory for the refugees, but they are now thankfully part of the past.

“We are safe here,” said a smiling Kalula D’Graci-Deo, a 25-year-old from DRC who returned home from her studies one day in May 2004 in Kinshasa to see her father – a critic of President Joseph Kabila – being hauled away by soldiers. “I am now in a country that knows what human rights are,” she added.

The young woman, who had already lost the rest of her family in the civil wars and continuing violence that have beset the country since 1996, found herself completely on her own, and decided to flee to the West African nation of Mali, and from there to Morocco in North Africa.

After a brief sojourn in the northwestern Moroccan city of Casablanca, she was captured by the police, who put her on a bus along with some 50 other refugees. The official destination of the bus was the city of Oujda, on the border between Algeria and Morocco. But halfway there, the refugees were forced to descend from the vehicle, which drove off, leaving them stranded in the middle of the desert.

The refugees divided into rival groups consisting of people from English and French-speaking African nations. “Men in the English-speaking group raped me. That’s what our life is like,” said Kalula.

For 36-year-old Odinga-Mobutu Livino, also from the DRC, the problems started when Laurent Kabila, the father of the current president, seized power from dictator Mobutu Sese Seko – who governed the country brutally starting in 1965 – in June 1997.

“President Kabila did not forgive his enemies. My father was killed and my family was forced to flee,” said Odinga. The exodus began with a voyage by canoe to Brazzaville, the capital of the neighbouring Republic of the Congo. >From there they migrated later to Gabon in West Africa.

But in Libreville, the capital of Gabon, Odinga was unable to find a job as a bank employee – his old occupation – and was forced to accept what work he could find, first as a gardener for the wealthy and later as the head of a team of stevedores.

But he lost his job last November, when the president of Gabon, Omar Bongo, was reelected, and Odinga’s boss gained a reputation as being against the regime. That put all of his employees in danger as well. As a foreigner, Odinga decided it would be safer to flee to Morocco, where he applied for asylum.

While waiting for a response from the Moroccan government, Odinga was forced to stay in his house. But one day he had no choice but to go out and buy medicine. On the way to the pharmacy, he was picked up by the police.

When he showed them his application for asylum, “They tore it up, and forced me onto a bus,” which took him, his cousin and other migrants from sub-Saharan Africa to the border with Mauritania.

But the bus stopped short of its official destination. Instead, “we were abandoned in the desert, where there were landmines all over the place, and many of the Senegalese immigrants lost their feet,” said Odinga.

Odinga and the others, who had no water or food, walked for “five scorching days and five freezing nights” in search of a village or some sign of life.

Many perished along the way, including Odinga’s cousin, “who died because I fell sick,” as he bitterly repeated several times. He lamented that the survivors were not even able to give their companions a proper burial. “The sand was continually shifting, and we were unable to find their bodies,” he said.

Kalula and Odinga said their time in Morocco was marked by extreme hostility from the authorities, “especially because they don’t like blacks.”

But a different face was seen when the migrants, who were trying to survive in the desert, came across remote hamlets.

“Every once in a while, in the middle of the desert, houses would appear, and women would come out. They were moved by our suffering, and offered us bread and dates, despite their extreme poverty,” said Kalula, moved to tears by the memory.

In a camp on the border with Mauritania, Odinga was able to find a telephone and describe the tragic experience to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva. The U.N. officials asked him if he and his companions wanted to go to Europe, to which he responded: “We just want to be safe, it doesn’t matter where.”

The odyssey finally came to end in the refugee camps in the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, where Madrid and Lisbon reached an agreement to extend refugee status to 20 migrants.

Spain took in eight and Portugal 12, María Teresa Tito de Morais, president of the non-governmental Portuguese Council for Refugees (CPR), said in an interview with IPS.

The activist stated that “Portugal cannot remain indifferent to what is happening in Ceuta and Melilla,” where Spain has opened reception centres in which refugees live in such poor conditions that international human rights activists have described them as “concentration camps.”

With respect to the 20 refugees who were granted asylum, “this is a very specific case, based on cooperation agreements between Portugal and Spain, where we decided to take in 12 refugees because they are in a high-risk situation,” said Tito de Morais.

She noted that the two Iberian peninsula countries share “the common problem of combating irregular immigration, and many authentic refugees could be among these migrants, which means we must be extremely cautious, especially when we are dealing with directives from the European Union, where the aim is for borders to become more and more tightly sealed.”

In December, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told José Manuel Durão Barroso, the president of the European Commission, in Brussels that terrorism must be fought firmly but that “refugees are not terrorists; they are victims of terrorism.”

He also stressed that following the terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005, there was a danger of “populist rhetoric” aimed at appeasing the general public which “mixes up security with refugees and immigrants.”

In the case of Portugal, “which follows the same lead as the rest of the EU and therefore does not have very open attitudes, the situation is less troublesome, because it isn’t a country that gets a lot of requests for asylum,” commented Tito de Morais, adding that the most sought-after destinations for refugees are Germany, France and Britain.

Of the 25 EU members, Portugal is one of the countries that takes in the smallest number of refugees and receives the fewest requests for refugee status, Interior Minister Antonio Costa reported earlier this month.

Only Estonia and Latvia receive fewer requests for asylum and accept a smaller number of refugees, while even countries that only recently joined the EU, like Malta and Lithuania, not only receive more requests, but also take in more refugees, he added.

According to Tito de Morais, in addition to accommodation at the refugee reception centre in Lourdes, 20 km from Lisbon, the 12 African refugees “will have access to legal, medical and psychological assistance and Portuguese language, computer and job training courses, as well as emergency social assistance payments of 30 euros (36 dollars) a week.”

The ultimate goal is “the integration of these 12 people into the labour market and Portuguese society,” she explained.

Tito de Morais also highlighted “the exceptional characteristics” of Guterres, a “renowned humanist” who served as prime minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002.

Upon taking over as the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Guterres stated that his “top priorities” would be to respond to the crisis in Africa, strengthen the means available to aid refugees, and consolidate international financial support.

Guterres also took aim at the changes in rules for granting asylum in the EU. Through spokesman Diederik Kramers, he stressed in December that a new EU directive on asylum procedures was troubling because it could lead to an even smaller number of requests for asylum being authorised.

Under the new rules, the right to appeal was practically eliminated, since asylum seekers can be turned back to allegedly “safe” third countries without even having had their claims heard in an EU member state, remarked Kramers, echoing a concern voiced by Guterres on numerous occasions.

There are many times when the EU does not distinguish between requests for asylum and immigration visas, he added.

In Portugal itself, Guterres’ appointment as High Commissioner for Refugees has had a notable impact on the local media, which previously paid very little attention to the human tragedy of refugees.

In the past, coverage of this issue was limited to “fluffy” photo-laden pieces about U.S. actress Angelina Jolie cuddling undernourished refugee children in her role as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador.